Offering an explanation why collective behavior can shift abruptly from avoidance to adoption of an alternative, or vice versa, [1]} provides an example where a slight change in distribution of individual thresholds leads to completely different outcomes: a system initially at one stable equilibrium switches to another one due to a change of the threshold of one individual. This change can be visualized as a change in the shape of the \(F_n\) -curve, which we will call the “activation curve”. We investigate other factors that can change this curve and lead to similar phenomena, including abrupt changes in outcome when an equilibrium disappears.
